Marija Stanonik was born in Dobračeva near Žiri. She started working at the SASA Institute for Slovenian Ethnology as a graduate in Slavic studies. She has done additional study and training at summer schools of Slavic studies in Czechoslovakia, Macedonia, Germany, and Poland. She has attended several international academic and professional conferences at home and abroad (Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Germany, and Poland).

In 1987 she obtained her master’s degree in the Department of Ethnology at Ljubljana's Faculty of Arts and in 1993 received a doctoral degree in philology at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Arts. In 1994 her doctoral dissertation was officially recognized in Slovenia as well and she obtained the Slovenian title “doctor of literary sciences.”

Stanonik has designed and managed the collection of Slovenian folklore stories Glasovi (Voices), through which 39 books have been published since 1988. Since 2002 she has published the newsletter Slovstvena folkloristika (Literary Folkloristic). Since 1995 she has given lectures in slovstvena folkloristika (literary folklore) at the Department of Slovenian Studies of the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Arts, and since 1998 at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature of the Faculty of Education in Maribor. She has been a member of the Slovenian Writers’ Association since 1998. She has received several awards, including the 2000 Murko Award.

Research interests

Literary folklore, literary composition, ethnology, Slavic studies, theory, history, vertical and horizontal classification, genre, proverbs, folk tales.